Yep, rather interesting the only time BD pulls ahead(by a VERY small margin) is at super high Res. I am glad I went with my 2600K I mean look at the pic fullinfusion posted. I mean c'mon 1.54V to hit 5Ghz?? That is just pure silliness. It is already a power soak at stock as it is...

Takes a brave man to pick up a BD and have aspirations of big overclocks. I really hope AMD fix this with Piledriver, I mean I said it when BD came out they should have just scrapped it and worked on Piledriver as that seems to be this CPU done right(if we are to believe the info we have)
Granted I haven't been with AMD since my Opty 170 rig and it was great to the point that it still felt "snappier" than the C2D E6600 I replaced it with. After seeing this I KNOW I chose wisely with SB.

Ya know, I'll just say. It is good that BD is at least delivering playable fps in those benches. Even if it doesn't win. I'll give it that much.

Glad to see Hard Reset made the benching cut. Bout time. Great game and indie bunch. Knew from the demo that it would be a title I'd want to see benched.

What I'd really like to see is a comprehensive upgrade guide. Take boards and setups from the last 5 years. Then run them on a stock set of benchmarks and list which should be upgraded.

I know others do per year benching but each year they change the benches. Really if I want to know how a new system is going to run on say, L4D or whatever else...I'll want to see it. But you see it one year, then the next, gone. Yeah you know it will be better, but its still nice to see it. Metro has been one of the only titles I've been able to count on being in the lists. Glad it still is.

question for ya w1zz: could you compile the results differently, so we have a DX9/11 comparison between the CPU's?

basically its to see if DX11's multithreading changes the results, since we have so many DX9/poorly threaded games which could skew the overall result towards the intel CPU's, with their better performance per thread, vs AMD's more threads.

edit: to make more sense, one of your 'total performance averaged out' charts, but one for DX9, one for DX11 titles.

Very nice review, thanks.
Bulldozer does alright in higher resolutions. Not bad at all, hopefully AMD can enhanced, fix and tweak Piledriver so it can better complete with Intel.
For me going with a FX-8120 was a big performance improvement over my late Phenom II, and it did not cost me an arm and a leg for the best Socket AM3+ mobo and Ram.

Thank you for doing this review. It's nice to have reaffirmed with data what I suspected (and hoped really) that I had no need to replace my i7 920. I knew, but looking at actual numbers was reassuring.

Yep, rather interesting the only time BD pulls ahead(by a VERY small margin) is at super high Res. I am glad I went with my 2600K I mean look at the pic fullinfusion posted. I mean c'mon 1.54V to hit 5Ghz?? That is just pure silliness. It is already a power soak at stock as it is...

Takes a brave man to pick up a BD and have aspirations of big overclocks. I really hope AMD fix this with Piledriver, I mean I said it when BD came out they should have just scrapped it and worked on Piledriver as that seems to be this CPU done right(if we are to believe the info we have)
Granted I haven't been with AMD since my Opty 170 rig and it was great to the point that it still felt "snappier" than the C2D E6600 I replaced it with. After seeing this I KNOW I chose wisely with SB.

My BD has been doing me very well and I have no regrets from it at all. I'd be interested in seeing a review when the Windows 7 BD FIX patch comes out and I like Mussle's Idea of an average split between DX9 games and dX11 games due to DX11's multithreading optimization.